Caroline Wawzonek

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I've had the opportunity to tour the facility here and meet with the producers, and I've heard from them that they certainly would, sounds like, prefer to see a discount on the retail end price as opposed to on the markup price. Mr. Speaker, we've certainly had that conversation many times. No doubt it would -- I can't say whether it would make a difference for them. You know, at this point I'd need to know what their numbers are. I can commit to reviewing the policy again. We've done that in the past. We've done that in response to this industry, prepared...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So now we're onto the heritage fund. Mr. Speaker, the heritage fund, in it right now, I believe, has around $40 million. It's a fund that is, yes, meant well, it's meant to be where we put a portion of the resource revenues that we do get here in the Northwest Territories. It was never meant to be something that we would zero out or hand out dollars at a time or cheques at a time. There are jurisdictions in this country, for example Alberta, where they have at times of great wealth, due to their resource situation, essentially handed out money to residents, and there...

I don't believe so, Madam Chair. Let's go with no.

Thank you, Madam Chair. So I just want to make sure I was clear. Carryovers reflected on capital projects in here? There wouldn't be. This would be only the operations. So there wouldn't be any carryovers reflected here. I'll just stop there. Thank you.

Madam Chair, let me put that to the deputy minister, please.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So, Mr. Speaker, if I'm understanding correctly I'm being asked if we would have a universal basic income, which a universal basic income means it's an amount paid to every single person regardless of their income status, regardless of their personal home household income, wealthy or otherwise, and that would then come from, of course, government coffers. So I just want to make sure that we're clear that universal basic income and guaranteed basic income are not necessarily the same thing. So let's start the conversation and make sure that we are talking about the same...

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, I actually purposely didn't try to say the name of the program earlier because I think I'm going to mispronounce it. But let me try. Wahilatoos is the name of the federal initiative. So this has come out even while we're waiting to see if the low carbon economy leadership fund will get renewed or well, when it will get renewed. Still hopeful on that. But this is what we've been directed to in the interim. Because that actually was, again, a significant source of funding that was helping the Government of the Northwest Territories to support programs...

Thank you, Madam Chair. So there are a significant amount of sunsets that are taking place, and that is where the cuts are coming from.

There has been some funding, $433,000 in funding, for new initiatives. So it just reduces the scope of what can what is possible under the Energy Action Plan right now. Obviously subject to perhaps seeing a renewal, hopefully seeing a renewal of the low carbon or the LCELF funding that the Member was mentioning but, yeah, thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, yeah, this is something that I thought a lot about in the last few years, had a lot of hope that there would be an improvement in morale over the last Assembly, and then somewhere between multiple waves of emergency events and lockdowns and evacuations, that became very challenging and folks became even more stretched. And we wind up in the last while with employees either unable to do their jobs because they can't go into their workplaces, then, you know, publicly getting maligned for that, and then in other cases being asked to do even more even when they...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I certainly have not had those kinds of conversations with the federal government, Mr. Speaker, nor do I nor can I say, really, how receptive they would be. The direction that we seem to be getting of late on areas when we do try to push the federal government for some awareness of the continued need for diesel in the Northwest Territories, in the North in general, tends to not be one that is received very favourably. So certainly can look at an opportunity to bring that forward, noting the realities of the North and noting the fact that some form of diesel is still...